ATLANTA (CNN) -- Not everyone is enchanted with NASA's plan to send a 77 year-
old astronaut-turned-politician into space this fall.

In fact, the news conference last January at which NASA Administrator Daniel
S. Goldin announced that U.S. Sen. John Glenn was returning to space had
barely gotten into the question-and-answer phase when the sniping began.

"There's been some suggestion that this assignment is a political payoff of
some sort," an aviation reporter said to Glenn. "That your performance at the
Senate hearings on campaign finance reform impressed the White House and that
this is a reward for that performance, if you will."

Glenn and Goldin emphatically denied the charge. "Nothing could be further
from the truth," said Glenn, a Democrat from Ohio. "I have to this day not
discussed the campaign finance hearings with the president, the vice president
or anyone at the White House."

But denials have little currency in Washington, and the doubters were just
tuning up. They have since questioned not only the validity of using Glenn to
study aging in space and the process by which he was chosen, but also whether
NASA has lost its vision and is content with "flagpole sitting" while the
heavens go unexplored.

Among the critics is Rick Tomlinson, president of the Space Frontier
Foundation, which he describes as "a very aggressive policy organization"
eager to see space opened up to commercial enterprise and colonization.

Tomlinson says his group is not impressed that "after 30 years, NASA is
finally able to put John Glenn in space."

"There will be no real statistical validity (to
Glenn's experiments), but the study wasn't
written that way."

Dr. Richard Hodes, Director The National Institute of Aging

Tomlinson calls the Glenn mission "a PR gimmick" and "a political connivance"
and he says that while there may be valid reasons for studying aging in space,
there are better candidates than Glenn.

"He jumped the line," Tomlinson says. "There are others ahead of him,"
including John Young, pilot of the first shuttle flight in 1981, and Story
Musgrave, a veteran of six trips into space. Young is 67; Musgrave, 62.

When Alex Roland, a former NASA historian and now chairman of the Duke
University history department, heard about Glenn's mission, his reaction was
that it was "a joke." Nothing has happened since to change his mind.

"It's probably harmless," Roland says, "but it trivializes the space program.
It seems as if they've got nothing better to do than send up an old, outdated
senator."

Even experts on aging who support Glenn's trip admit that it is unreasonable
to expect anything momentous from the data it would provide.

"There are valid questions we have to understand," says Dr. Richard Sprott, a
scientific adviser to the National Institute of Aging (NIA). "But one older
subject won't answer any question definitively."

"It's probably harmless, but it trivializes the space program. It
seems as if they've got nothing better to do than send up an old, outdated
senator." "

Alex Roland, former NASA historian

"There will be no real statistical validity" to Glenn's trip, agrees Dr.
Richard Hodes, director of the NIA, "but the study wasn't written that way."

The study was set up to investigate things that are common both to astronauts
in "microgravity" and the elderly on earth: loss of muscle mass, bone
demineralization, loss of cardiovascular fitness, sleep disturbances and
balance disorders.

Such conditions are reversed when the astronauts return to Earth, but not in
the elderly. Says Sprott, "If we find something in zero gravity to prevent
such things, or to help astronauts recover from them more quickly, then they
should be used on Earth, too."

Hodes says bone demineralization must be overcome before a manned spacecraft
can be sent to Mars and is also "a problem of enormous dimension in the
elderly." It takes on added significance as the baby boom generation eases
into its twilight years and looks to a health-care system that may or may not
be able to cope with it.

"Senator Glenn is really quite remarkable," Hodes says, praising not only the
senator's physical vigor -- he speed-walks 2 miles a day and also trains with
weights -- but his intellectual vitality as well. The challenge, he says, "is
to understand what influences some people to age more successfully than
others."

But Glenn is not your average senior citizen, and some suspect that his
interest in aging, his insistence that NASA study it in space and his frequent
calls to Goldin finally won him a seat on the shuttle.

Goldin encouraged such thinking at the news conference when he said, "Standing
next to me is the most tenacious human being on the face of this planet."

Sending an authentic American hero back into space who also happens to
be fit and 77 years old and whose presence is scientifically defensible has all the
earmarks of a major marketing coup.

NASA is a high-profile federal agency, one that almost from the outset
provided America with heroes and inspiring moments. Its vision, says Roland,
is "huge: humans are not meant to stay on Earth. Our destiny is to populate
the heavens."

But the agency depends on the president and Congress for its funding. While
Goldin says President Clinton knew nothing about Glenn's selection until after
Goldin had made the decision, one does not get to be the administrator of a
major federal agency in Washington without having the big picture clearly in
focus.

Sending an authentic American hero back into space who also happens to be fit
and 77 years old and whose presence is scientifically defensible -- and
possibly even inspiring to a growing segment of the population -- has all the
earmarks of a major marketing coup.

And NASA is into marketing.

Roland says that NASA concluded many years ago that it had to have astronauts
in the air often as a way of keeping itself in the public awareness and
ensuring a steady flow of funds.
But the decision has been a costly one.

Roland, who teaches military history and the history of technology, says the
shuttle flights are so expensive -- NASA puts this year's shuttle missions
costs at $477 million each -- that they have put NASA "in a budget crisis of
its own making."

Flying astronauts, he says, takes the lion's share of the budget and confines
NASA to near-Earth orbital missions where it does little significant
development or exploration.

"NASA is plodding along doing what it's been doing for decades," says Roland.
"Astronauts have been flying up there for 17-18 years, and it's hard to see
what they've accomplished."

He notes that when astronauts come back from shuttle missions, they talk about
the view, how it was to work with the Russians and the like. "They sound like
tourists rather than professionals or business people doing anything," he
says.

NASA is participating in the development of a new international space station
with Russia and several other nations. Roland and others question the
usefulness of the station. They say the money would be better invested on
developing an inexpensive, safe and efficient "launch vehicle" to replace the
rockets that have been used for decades.

"NASA has gotten itself into a very terrible and vulnerable posture," says
Musgrave. "The space station dictates that the shuttle must fly another 15
years, and that technology is '60s technology."

Musgrave says the shuttle is "a fragile design. It's bolting a butterfly to a
rocket. There are 36,000 tiles on it. If the components fail, it fails. It's
fragile, dangerous, risky."

Musgrave is a part-time consultant to CNN who left NASA after he was told he
was too old to return to space. Nevertheless, he cannot conceal his admiration
for his old employer, saying "they're doing a marvelous job" of keeping the
shuttle going. "They're running perfect shuttles," he says.

As for the space station, he says, "They've spent 14 years and $20 billion on
it and they don't have a screw in orbit."

Roland dismisses the space station as "more flagpole sitting." He adds, "The
dirty little secret about the space program is that these guys are bored to
tears. They're floating around up there for months on end eating bad food."

Roland likens what NASA is doing now to the early years of aviation when
pilots had nothing better to do flew around the country barnstorming. He says
it wasn't until aviation became a commercial enterprise that innovation and
creativity were freed to turn it into a major industry.

One of those aiming to put commerce in space is Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr., who flew on Gemini 5 in 1965 with Gordon Cooper, one of the original "Mercury seven." Conrad has four companies devoted to such enterprises as tracking satellites and developing a low-cost launch vehicle.

Conrad, 68, says he is happy for Glenn and admits to
good-natured jealousy about Glenn's upcoming trip. But he says that by the
time he is 77 he expects to have been back into space aboard his own rocket.

Asked when it would be ready, he says, "A lot sooner than (NASA's)."

NASA didn't respond to requests to discuss whether it went "off in the wrong
direction," as Conrad puts it. But Conrad and Roland say Goldin is trying to
get NASA back on track. He has streamlined the agency and the astronaut
program now swallows only about half of NASA's budget. It was once up around
two-thirds.

NASA is also developing a new launch vehicle, although Roland say it is
starved for funds. And Conrad says "Defense and government contractors
couldn't make anything inexpensive if their lives depended on it."

Musgrave says the president and Congress should tell NASA it is going to
develop a low-cost rocket in five years, "and don't let it skip a day. We need
the same urgency and esprit and discipline that the Apollo program had."

As for Glenn's mission, Musgrave says, "It's not being done for the science,
it's being done for the right reason. It's a good thing to do, but we could
have been more honest about it. You need to get it on the table and talk
authentically about what you're doing."

Musgrave says the Glenn mission provides "historic closure" that is
symbolically important for the agency and the American public as well.

"If we don't turn space flight into art, it's going to die," he says. "Even if
the medical data is just a single point, it contributes to the overall meaning
of space flight. The reason we're in space is it's an inward turn. People are
after meaning and hope. It's about the human spirit, the quest. If we're not
questing, it gets boring. It has to touch 'em."

It may be that Glenn's return to space will focus attention on what NASA is not doing as well as what it is doing.

It does not, for example, seem to have grabbed the interest of Generation X. Former NASA historian Roland says his students at Duke show little interest in NASA or the Russian Mir space station. And while Musgrave says NASA has done " a marvelous job" with its shuttle missions, shuttles come and go with the frequency - and the drama - of the QE2.

If NASA is going to rekindle public interest in the space program, to borrow a phrase from science fiction, it may have to go "where no man has gone before."